Away from the maddening crowd in Barbados

August 15, 2015

One of the treats to enjoy in Barbados is to take the bus. Most of the hotels on the somewhat over-stuffed west coast do tours but for five Barbadian dollars you can hop on public transport and go to Bathsheba on the unspoilt east coast. The tourist board explains this exotic name by invoking the legend of Bathsheba, wife of King David, who bathed in milk to keep her skin beautiful and soft. The surf covered white waters are said to resemble Bathsheba's bath in both appearance health giving value. Well, why not. It’s a beautiful spot with huge coral boulders along the empty beach and free of the west coast traffic and the crowded hotels.

One exception is Speightstown, which is delightfully ramshackle and relatively uncommercial. Best way to get there is on one of the reggae buses which blast their way along, shaking with music. There is an interesting building for sale in the town called the Old Pharmacy, above. It is painted a bright blue, with tall windows, a balcony that runs the length of the building under a pitched gabled roof and dormer windows.

According to local historians this style of architecture was imported to another British colony - Carolina. And there’s a reason for that: Only the oldest sons of the British colonialists who grew rich on the Barbadian sugar trade could inherit the family plantation. Many of the younger siblings headed for Carolina, bringing with them their lifestyle and architecture. I’m told that only three of these houses exist, the rest destroyed by fires over the centuries.

FIVE GREAT NEW HISTORICAL BOOKS

New European, May 28, 2020

Voices of the Mayflower by Richard Holledge

July marks the 400 years since a motley bunch of people sailed across the Atlantic to the New World on a surprisingly small tub called the Mayflower. Among the many books and programmes commemorating the anniversary few will have the human insight of this, in which Holledge brings the voyage to life with an account that is not quite fact but not completely fiction either. As ever the best history is told though individual stories and Holledge’s imagined voices speak to us eloquently down the centuries.’

The Scattered; a saga of suffering and survival

Love lost; love regained. Freedom; oppression. The casual cruelty of great nations; the plight of the weak and dispossessed. And against all hope—survival and a new life.

The Scattered dramatizes the incredible life of one man and the people he loved, caught up in the saga that befell the Acadians, a simple, peaceable people, who were expelled by the British from their homes in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755. The great powers—France and Britain—were caught up in a titanic battle for power in North America. The small enclave of French-speaking Acadians were in the way and were brushed aside.

To find out more, please go to The Scattered at Amazon

Here's a book for anyone who endured - or enjoyed -working in British national newspapers over the past 30-plus years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/reverse-ferret-a-fleet-st_b_9538290.html

Aah, takes me back … to the days of four-day weeks, long liquid lunches, typewriters, spikes and sub-editors. Before desks became workstations, shorthand gave way to Dictaphones and then iPhones, and when every good reporter had his own Deep Throat inside the police force.

It probably takes a Fleet Street veteran to identify the inspiration for the title of this novel. Like me, anyone who was there in the 1980s might think they can identify some of the real-life journalists thinly-disguised as characters in this gloriously funny and racy romp - even though their names have been stolen or adapted from locations in Manchester - Hazel Grove, Miles Platting, Clough Boggart for a start.

But I was brought to a full stop (or should I say ‘point, new par’?) when I realised I was present at an event which becomes quite central to the plot. It was one of those ‘think tanks’ - or drink tanks - that used to be a popular excuse to combine a weekend in a luxury hotel, often with its own golf course, with a brief spell of brainstorming. I think I may even have had a hand in organising this one, at Hever Castle, one-time home of Anne Boleyn.

It was at that moment I realised that the W.M.Boot credited as the author was not only someone familiar with the inner workings of long-lost Fleet Street AND Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ but also someone I had worked alongside. It took me a while but I eventually figured out who he (or she) is, and I am sworn to secrecy. Although anyone familiar with Humbert Wolfe’s view of British journalists will know that it might not take too much persuasion to get me to reveal all.

Regardless of my own involvement in the story, and my acquaintance with the author and his characters, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read and a realistic insight behind the scenes of tabloid newspapers before they were eviscerated by a combination of Leveson and the internet. When journalists were more interested in tippling than tweeting, and for whom sex was more important than selfies.

It was published just over a year ago and I can’t believe it has not been reviewed by Press Gazette or on the media pages of The Guardian. It deserves a wider audience - beyond those who can say ‘I was there.”

*********

This is an hilarious book on the excesses of Fleet Street. I thought the phone hacking scandal was bad enough but this is an often rumbustious dive into murky waters or crime, venality, huge egos and lots of sex. Racism, sexism, alcoholism - it’s all here.

But it is more than just a kiss and tell. It is something of a morality tale in which the hero fulfils his ambition - but at a terrible price. I really enjoyed the uncomfortable mix of satire and seriousness.

******

Jonathan

5.0 out of 5 stars

Putting the Boot into Fleet Street

Enjoyed this review by fellow hack Arnie Wilson, spotted on Huffington Post (see above)

"Reverse Ferret is a book about Fleet Street. And the suspicious, somewhat sexually explicit death – was it murder? – of the editor of the mythical “Sunday Chronicle”.

Not just any book about London’s famous (former) national newspaper HQ but one of the best – racy, intelligent, witty, slick, and so tightly crafted that it almost needs oxygen in order to breathe. What a shame that most readers aged - shall we say under 40 – might understand the naughty bits but won’t really understand the best bits (although these are sometimes one and the same). Nor will they really register the news events or even the TV programmes of the age – the Falklands War, for example. Or Dirty Den. Or even the Page 3 girl “Luscious Lovely Linda Lusardi”.

Fleet Street and its reporters’ modus operandi (long alcoholic lunches, typewriters, and the chance to actually get out of the office and meet real people instead of so often relying these days on sandwiches at your desk, email press releases and interviews) is no more.

Reverse ferret is a phrase “used predominantly within the British media to describe a sudden reversal in an organisation's editorial line on a certain issue - and generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position”. The term apparently originates from Kelvin MacKenzie's time at The “soaraway” Sun – sometimes known as the “current bun”. And if ever the swashbuckling nature of Fleet Street of the 1980s could ever be captured in a single real-life character it was MacKenzie!

W.M. Boot is not, of course, the author’s real name. (And is not related to William Boot, the fictional journalist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop). But I know who he or she is - a chum who gave me my first ever taste of Fleet Street in the ‘70s. Thanks Boot. I won’t put the boot in my naming you since some of the characters in Reverse Ferret are known to both of us and might be unhappy with their portrayal! Suffice it to say that Boot was an executive on several national newspapers - the Daily and Sunday Mirror, The European, Today, the late lamented Independent and the Times. Among others. And I know of one “other” in particular, but I won’t give the game away.

What does amaze me is the obviously superior classical education that Boot was able to conceal from us when working on some of our saucier stories. Where DID Boot learn that vast academic knowledge? Not in Fleet Street that’s for sure!

Boot certainly bears no resemblance to Miles Platting, a character in the book “whose career as a showbiz writer had spiralled into drunken oblivion after his wife had left him for a young reporter she met at a Chronicle office party.

“He missed deadlines, failed to turn up at interviews, and when he did, invariably had a row with the star. As Tarquin (another character in the book) put it: ‘The Man The Stars Talk To became The Hack The Stars Do Their Best To Run A Mile From’.

One of the funniest characters in Reverse Ferret is a slimy and corrupt policeman, Inspector Dennis Droyle who “had the disconcerting habit of adding an aitch at the most unpredictable moments in what was presumably an attempt to shun the ‘ello ‘ello stereotype of the TV copper, but any attempt at gravity was vitiated by his voice, a high-pitched, adenoidal whine”.

Example: “Hi must say – I rather thought you National newspaper journalists would be living in a more hopulent suite of offices than this.”

But Boot writes: “Hopulent they were not. The features staff were packed together as tightly as a traffic jam on the new M25. There were seven of them in theory, sharing a hugger mugger of desks, bedecked with dirty mugs that nurtured vivid biospecimens , pots of glue and chewed Biros, hemmed in by overflowing waste bins (and), stacks of newspapers”.

Sooner or later, of course, on-screen technology would seep like a virus into all newspaper offices including the “Chronic”. There was a “charge against change” from the staff who “wanted to stay working as they always had, tapping at their typewriters, using paper, ballpoints, scissors and glue. They relished the familiarity of the office, with its smell of damp page proofs, the background clatter of the Linotype machines, the rumble of the presses. If it was good enough for Caxton, it was good enough for them.”

Sadly (perhaps) it was not to be. But with hindsight, Fleet Street was always good fun. Thanks, Boot, for reminding us. And that “heditor” who died? Was it murder? You’ll have to read the book to henlighten yourselves!

– Arnie Wilson

*******

Subs desk

A book that takes you back to the Valpolicella-fuelled newsrooms of the 1980s. Deftly-plotted and highly entertaining with a cast of characters that will be familiar to those who were around at the time.

Who listens?

Who hears?

The Acadian tragedy

260 years on

My old friend Arnie Wilson had this to say in his Huffington Post blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/the-scattered-by-richard-holledge_b_7878142.html